Those Seventies shows

American cinema of this decade will probably be seen as one that turned back to the films of the 1970s for inspiration. There have been far too many remakes of '70s features, particularly the horror genre revamps of Wes Craven and John Carpenter movies, along with pointless revisits to such screen fodder as Fun with Dick and Jane or superfluous attempts to better a classic, such as the forthcoming Taking of Pelham 123.

Stylistically, though, the '70s have had a stronger influence. There's been a welcome return to the gritty New York-based crime drama, with The Seven Ups, The French Connection and the aforementioned Taking of Pelham 123 inspiring Inside Man, Lucky Number Slevin and the films of James Gray.

A subgenre within the crime film category that also has a strong '70s pedigree is the conspiracy thriller. One of the great directors within this offshoot was Alan J. Pakula, the man behind 1971's Klute, 1974's The Parallax View and 1976's All the President's Men. It's these three films (especially the latter) that inform Kevin MacDonald's new movie, State of Play, which, in an altered form, began life as a six-part television serial on the BBC.

Not having seen the BBC series, I cannot provide a comparison. But, as a student of '70s films, I can fully appreciate what MacDonald and his screenwriters (foremost among them Tony Gilroy) have attempted to do.

As in Pakula's work, there's a political conspiracy that centers the film. As in Parallax View and All the President's Men, it's newspaper journalists who strive to expose the truth, often at great risk (the Parallax View's web of criminality entrapped and destroyed the reporter played by Warren Beatty).

As with Parallax View, MacDonald's State of Play explodes on the screen with murders. Two men, a thief and an innocent bystander, are methodically gunned down by a blank-faced killer. This is material for a page 3 strip or feature in a newspaper, the two men being far too ordinary to matter. But soon another murder takes place, and this time the victim is an aide to a U.S. congressman investigating a Haliburton-like defense corporation.

When it's discovered that the aide was also the congressman's mistress, the Washington Globe reporters are no longer slouching at their desks. And, when a link emerges between the seemingly random shooting of the two men and the dead aide, reporters Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) and Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) take to foot to track down the story.

McAffrey and Frye are the Washington Globe's answer to the Washington Post's Woodward and Bernstein, the real-life hacks who broke the Watergate case and were played by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in All the President's Men. Just like Woodward and Bernstein, McAffrey and Frye will, at first, seem ill-matched as a pair. McAffrey is strictly old-school, a journalist that wouldn't look out of place in The Front Page or Deadline U.S.A. His desk is a messy monument to a serious single-mindedness, which demands churning out fully fact-checked, readable news copy.

Frye is very much the opposite. In fact, as far as McAffrey is concerned, she's one of the angels of death for journalism. Frye is one of the Globe's top bloggers, creating Web site copy that McAffrey believes (and with good reason) heralds the death of professional journalism. Yet these two very different people will combine their talents to track the conspiracy through its labyrinth.

It would be pleasing to say that State of Play is as finely plotted as Pakula's trilogy of thrillers. But its script, for all its sophistication and inventiveness, poses more problems than it can solve. Perhaps this is a result of reducing a multi-houred series to a two-hour format. Those who have seen both would be better placed to comment.

Nonetheless, State of Play does generate power. It's certainly never dull, and, as the script was helmed by Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Duplicity), there are plenty of surprising reversals in the story - Gilroy's specialty.

What truly makes MacDonald's film fascinating is that it could very well be one of the last set in contemporary times where the action is centered on a newsroom, and where the major protagonists are newspaper reporters. For the friction between Frye and McAffrey is far from trivial. Newspapers are dying in the face of the Internet's rise. Blogs will kill the journalism stars - in fact, they already are. That lends a valedictory quality to State of Play, something made apparent in the film's closing titles, which follows the story that McAffrey and Frye write from the editor's desktop, to the rolling press, to the delivery truck. It's a process that is quickly being dismantled around America.

The cast of State of Play is superb. Crowe, after a number of disappointing and false performances, is back in full-force as the scrappy, disheveled McAffrey. Rachel McAdams' Della Frye (a perfect name for a crack hack) matches Crowe in depth and intensity. The supporting cast - Helen Mirren as the Globe's tough editor, Ben Affleck as the congressman in the center of the conspiracy, Robin Wright Penn as his long-suffering wife and Jeff Daniels as a menacing Southern senator - all hit their marks. There's also a fine turn by Jason Bateman as a gone-to-seed club promoter, with a performance that nearly steals the film.

Competent and engrossing, State of Play obviously doesn't shift American cinema in any new direction. Still, it would have made a good '70s film, and that's high praise.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at
ssilvis@praguepost.com